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| Nuclear test explosion in Mururoa atoll, French Polynesia, in 1971. The official expert group says the Anthropocene should begin about 1950 and is likely to be defined by the radioactive elements dispersed across Earth by nuclear bomb tests. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images |
The problem that humans have is no appreciation for the vastness of the passage of time in large scale. In other words, we don't believe what we haven't seen physically: climate change, evolution and a ~13.5 billion age universe noted science examples. It's exacerbated by the Internet and our current notions that information - and thus problems and resolutions - are concluded quickly. It is sobering this epoch has now been declared twelve years before I appeared on the planet.
Humanity’s impact on the Earth is now so profound that a new geological epoch – the Anthropocene – needs to be declared, according to an official expert group who presented the recommendation to the International Geological Congress in Cape Town on Monday.
The new epoch should begin about 1950, the experts said, and was likely to be defined by the radioactive elements dispersed across the planet by nuclear bomb tests, although an array of other signals, including plastic pollution, soot from power stations, concrete, and even the bones left by the global proliferation of the domestic chicken were now under consideration.
The current epoch, the Holocene, is the 12,000 years of stable climate since the last ice age during which all human civilisation developed. But the striking acceleration since the mid-20th century of carbon dioxide emissions and sea level rise, the global mass extinction of species, and the transformation of land by deforestation and development mark the end of that slice of geological time, the experts argue. The Earth is so profoundly changed that the Holocene must give way to the Anthropocene.
The Guardian:
The Anthropocene epoch: scientists declare dawn of human-influenced age
Damian Carrington
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